Return of the Pilgrim

Los Angeles, as they say, is a city of pilgrims. But some pilgrims are more special than others. In 1939, a young man climbed out of a cross-country bus at the downtown station and stared in wonder at the scene that greeted him.

It was a Saturday night, and the streets of downtown were swarming with drunks. He watched as some sailors carried a girl into a house for God knows what reason. Los Angeles, he concluded, was probably “the ugliest city on earth.”

Christopher Isherwood had arrived. He was 34, openly gay, British and broke. All in all, not the type of pilgrim you would predict to thrive in prewar Los Angeles.

But thrive he did. Already a novelist, Isherwood would settle here and become the chronicler of an amazing, brief time when this city served as the capital-in-exile of European high culture.

Isherwood, you see, had arrived on the cusp of history. In Europe the war raged. The intelligentsia of the continent were fleeing and, as if by some tacit agreement, they decided Los Angeles was the place to gather.

The group included novelists Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley, composer Igor Stravinsky, dramatist Berthold Brecht, playwright Berthold Viertel and, as they say, a host of others.

You might think the logical place for this crowd would have been New York. But no. They came here, seeking sunny skies and, most important, a little work from the studios. They got both.

During their stay, Isherwood met them, worked with them and kept a diary. He died in 1986 at his home in Pacific Palisades, and now the diary has been published by Harper Collins.

“Last night, I went to a big party at the Huxleys,” Isherwood writes of an evening in 1939. “The walls are hung with semierotic, fetishist pictures of ‘cruel’ ladies in boots. . . . The lighting is dim and sexually inviting . . . so dark that a lady--the first person I spoke to--said: ‘Will you please light my cigarette so I can see your face?’ This was Benita Hume, the actress, rather drunk.

“Now Aldous swam out of the warm gloom, like a great, blind, deep-sea fish, to introduce me to his brother Julian. I had expected him to be more human than Aldous, warmer, less pedantic. Actually, he seemed prim, severe. . . . Julian was very much the official representative of England at war.”

As you can see, Isherwood loved to skewer. Over time, the colony of expatriates managed to attract the best of the Hollywood elite to its parties, and Isherwood neglects none of them. Of Greta Garbo’s vacuity, he writes, “If you watch her for a quarter of an hour, you see every one of her famous expressions. She repeats them, quite irrelevantly. There is . . . the sternness of Ninotchka, the . . . open-lipped surrender of Camille, Mata Hara’s wicked laugh.”

Another time, Isherwood tells of Samuel Goldwyn trying to prevent him from using the word “Gestapo” in a script for another studio, claiming that MGM owned the concept. An underling had to explain that no one owned the Gestapo.

However jaded the expatriates grew over Hollywood, they remained dazzled by their adopted home. They drove to the Salton Sea by moonlight, dipping their toes in its blood-warm water. They acquired midwinter tans. At one party, Garbo climbed a tree to pick fruit and toss it down to the other guests. They seemed to sense they had come to a land of milk and honey.

One day they went hiking in Topanga Canyon until they were stopped by a fence. The group was so disappointed they decided to dig under the fence. Down on all fours went Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell, kicking up dirt like a pair of mutts.

“I remember Bertrand Russell holding forth to Aldous on some philosophical topic and digging as he talked, with the air of a father joining in a game to amuse the children. Only in this case, he was both father and child.”

Eventually, though, Los Angeles also infected them with its spiritual malaise. Some took refuge in drugs or sought out a local swami. Others turned toward the pleasures of the flesh. Isherwood reports that he spent a year promiscuously crawling from bed to bed.

And then, when the war ended, most of them departed, leaving little trace either on Hollywood or the city that gave them refuge.

Gore Vidal, a friend of Isherwood, says they represented “one of the most amazing groups of expatriates in history. You couldn’t imagine a more dazzling crowd. And the studios, by the way, appreciated them and helped them in ways that would not happen today. The equivalent of Aldous Huxley would not be hired by the equivalent of MGM today.”

Asked about the relative paucity of their Hollywood output compared to their high-flown reputations, Vidal replies, “I would say that’s only to their credit. Did you want Huxley to have written Ben-Hur?”

In any case, they left, but diarist Isherwood stayed. He had found a home in the city he once described as the ugliest on earth. He wrote more novels and plays, financing it all with a reliable stream of work from the studios. And he kept writing his diary.

“Actually, in my sane moments, I love this country. I love it just because I don’t belong. Because I’m not involved in its traditions, not born under the curse of its history. I feel free here. I’m on my own. My life will be what I make of it.”

No pilgrim ever said it better.